The hotel industry has long been viewed as a customer-service industry in addition to its primary objective of “providing a bed for the night.” In fact, some hotels have developed outstanding accommodations that are commonly used as convention centers and reception halls rather than temporary living quarters. To distinguish the difference in accommodations and services a guest can expect from a particular hotel, the one-to-five-star rating system, an internationally recognized business practice, is applied. The British Tourist Authority has the following to say about star ratings: “star ratings symbolize the level of service, range of facilities, and quality of guest care that you can expect. Hotels are required to meet progressively higher standards as they move up the scale from one to five stars.” A hotel with a one-star rating offers practical accommodation with a limited range of facilities and services, but a high standard of cleanliness throughout and 75 percent of bedrooms will have private bathroom facilities. A five star hotel offers the highest international quality of accommodation, facilities, services and cuisine. There will be a range of extra facilities to make the patron feel well cared for by professional, attentive staff who provide flawless guest services.
Presently, most five-star hotels employ some form of computerized property-management system to enable them to track a guest's stay duration, pay-per-view ordering, room-service ordering, smoking/nonsmoking room request, etc. Current property-management systems offer a marginal benefit to the hotels that employ them beyond tracking account activity. In addition, they offer virtually no added value to the hotel guest. A limited number of guest preferences such as smoking/nonsmoking rooms are indicated during booking of the room or at check-in, but no mechanism exists, save the present invention, to keep track of guest preferences and to make these preferences known to various associated hotels. Thus, a hotel in southern Florida does not follow or learn about preferences from guests who stay in western Missouri.
The prior art results in a great deal of time wasted by the guest and hotel staff continually traversing the same process during room booking and check-in. A new system is needed to streamline the process to reduce wasted effort and provide a greater variety of customized services. For example, it is common for hotels to provide guests with complimentary copies of national newspapers. However, no mechanism currently exists for a hotel to know the dates of a particular guest's visit and to order the appropriate preferred newspaper. In this way, a guest from Kansas City could stay informed on the daily progress of the local city football team during an autumn stay in Miami.
A more specific list of desirable improvements over the prior art follows. It is desirable and currently unavailable for a hotel to provide a mechanism for a guest to specify specific details of the guest-room environment. It is desirable for the hotel to already know the room temperature, bathroom amenities, lighting, décor and the like that a guest prefers and have the room prepared accordingly. It is also desirable for a hotel to know a guest's music and television preferences and have the appropriate media content available. An opportunity for significant resource conservation exists if only certain media content is delivered. In practice, the prior art delivers a great deal more media content to guest rooms than is consumed by the guests. The customization of other hotel amenities such as minibar selections, laundry pick-up time, and business services is also desirable. Tracking a guest's location within the hospitality site for customizing the environment of the occupied room, such as the health club, would also be advantageous.